How to Stay Miserable: A Guide for the Serious Practitioner

A man came into my office a few years back wanting to change. He said the words everybody says. He wanted to be happier. He wanted his life to mean something. He sat across from me looking exhausted in that particular way where a person has stopped expecting anything good to happen to them, and he asked me to help him feel differently.

I am proud to say that man is, to this day, just as anxious and worn down as he was the afternoon I met him. He did the work. He earned it. And since so many of you write in asking how to achieve what he achieved, I have decided to put my method in writing.

Let me say up front, you do not need to master every point below. Some of my most miserable clients have built an entire life on a single principle, applied with real devotion. But for those of you serious about the craft, here is the full course.

Resolve to change everything, every January first. Pick the biggest goals you can find. Read the Bible daily, lose the weight, finally get serious about prayer. Announce it if you can, it adds weight to the eventual verdict. Then, when February arrives and the plan has quietly died, you will have gathered all the evidence you need. You are simply not the kind of person who changes. File this away. You will want it later, on the days you consider trying again.

Keep your spiritual practices sincere in form and empty in substance. Go to church, certainly, Sunday morning is enough. Do not let anyone talk you into joining, into being known, into being missed when you are absent. Read your Bible too, a chapter here and there, checked off a list. The goal is coverage, not confrontation. You want to be able to say you have done these things without ever once being troubled by what you found there.

Let your relationships run wide and shallow. Collect people. Text often, show up to things, be well liked. Just make sure nobody, and I mean nobody, actually knows what is going on underneath. This applies with special force to your spouse. Real vulnerability is a gamble, and you cannot be sure the people closest to you would still want you if they saw the whole picture. Better to keep the picture curated. A marriage of two well maintained facades is a marriage that costs you almost nothing.

Never settle into a single, honest rhythm. Some of my clients ask if they should be busy or if they should be idle. Why choose? The advanced student alternates. Scroll until three in the morning, then spend the next four days in a frenzy of guilty overcorrection to make up for lost time. Rest never arrives either way, and that is precisely the point.

Guard yourself against solitude with the Lord. You can be isolated from people and still, somehow, never be alone with God, and this is the trick worth learning. Keep noise running in the background of your life at all times. A podcast, a show, a notification. The prayer closet is where conviction likes to work, so simply never go there long enough for it to find you.

Treat your feelings as an infallible witness. If you wake up dreading the day, trust it completely, the dread is the truth and the day has earned it. Cancel what you can. And when a small mercy lifts your mood for an afternoon, ride the high as proof that things are finally turning around, so that its inevitable collapse by evening can be added to the file marked, you were foolish to hope.

Pray about your anxiety, and then keep every ounce of it. This one deserves real credit, because it fools even careful people. Bring your worry to the Lord each morning, say the right words, mean them even. Then pick the anxiety back up on your way out the door and let it drive you all day. You have prayed, so your conscience is clear. You are anxious, so you will get an enormous amount done. Productive people rarely get questioned, and a well managed panic looks, from the outside, exactly like diligence.

Replace rest with entertainment. Scripture keeps insisting that you were made to rest, so do not actually do that. Fill the space instead. A show, a scroll, a hobby, a night out, whatever keeps the body occupied and the soul untouched. You will tell yourself you rested this weekend. You will not be able to say what for.

Let your work be toil instead of labor. Real work, the kind God calls good, connects to something. Untether yours from any of that. Show up, get through it, count down to Friday, count down to retirement most of all. Let the whole shape of your working life be escape rather than offering. This keeps that old itch for purpose alive in you without ever feeding it, which is exactly the tension you are aiming for

Enthrone your family, quietly, in the place that belongs to God. This is a subtle one, so pay attention. Nobody will ever question a man who says his family comes first. It sounds, in fact, admirably biblical. But ask yourself honestly what would actually be different in your daily life if God came before them rather than the other way around. For most of my clients, the honest answer is nothing at all, and that is how you know the arrangement is working.

I could go on. Some of you have already found me through worse means than reading, comparing your walk with God against everyone else's highlight reel, or turning your theology into a sport you win rather than a truth that humbles you. There is always more work to be done.

But perhaps you are reading this and something in it landed closer than you would like. Perhaps you recognized the fast food, the shallow marriage, the prayer that changes nothing about how you carry the day. I will step out of character long enough to say that none of this is inevitable. If you want to talk to someone about how meaningful change is actually possible through the means of biblical grace — please contact me to get a 15 minute consultation.